Big and Getting Bigger

Came across this picture of Downtown Qingdao in the Shandong Province of China. These building are primarily residential and are all newly built.

This is a new bridge that connects Qingdao to other coastal cities in China. It is over 16 miles long and has 6 lanes.

I really cant grasp how China, India and all of Asia is able to just explode in growth but I would say half of my client’s that are buying real estate in Hoboken and Jersey City and the waterfront in Weehawken and West New York are using money which was generated overseas and is being invested here in America.

Let me digress. The more I read about urban growth around the Globe in places like Brazil, Mexico, Yemen and Nigeria the more amazed I am that the Earth can sustain all this growth. When I was in high school the Malthusian Theory predicated mass starvation and disease in the future since human population would rise exponentially and food supplies would increase only arithmetically. When he wrote this theory around 1780 the world population was about one billion but 230 years later world population is at 7 billion and rising. Even though his theory was wrong I cant help but wonder how there can enough fish in the water to allow me to have fresh sushi wherever I go. My last digression about population growth is that 23 million chicken are killed each day in America for food. Worldwide over 50 billion chicken are killed each year to feed the people of the world and that is only a small percentage of the daily food consumption of other animals and fish that are consumed daily throughout the world. And lets not even begin to think about the garbage and waste that is generated by all this consumption. On a day to day basis it all seems so simple and easy, I go to Kings buy what I want and cook up a nice meal. The dichotomy between the complex engines of civilization that can seamlessly deliver such simple pleasures and the day to day enjoyment of products of those engines is astounding.